


In defiance

by SLWalker



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-30
Updated: 2018-03-30
Packaged: 2019-04-14 22:05:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14145585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SLWalker/pseuds/SLWalker
Summary: He is here for closure, more than anything else.  An ending.





	In defiance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [symphorophilia (klismaphilia)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/klismaphilia/gifts).



> Hello, symphorophilian! This is a canon divergence of Rebels, but I don't think you really have to be into Rebels to follow it; I figured that to come to terms and acceptance, Maul couldn't actually be dead to do that. XD I hope that I've answered your prompt fairly and given you a good story. 
> 
> And many thanks to my best fiend and editor Shadowmaat, who kicked this into shape for me.

"I've had a lot of time to think," Kenobi says, his voice ground as rough as the sands on which he has dwelled these many years, the toll of time written in the lines of his face and the stark white of his hair.

They are of an apparent age which is well beyond the years that they've lived. Kenobi wears it on his skin; Maul wears it on his bones. If ever there is a truth that Maul has discovered, it is this: The Force doesn't care and never has. There are no intentions good nor ill; it's a cosmic and pitiless thing much bigger than their tiny, fleeting struggles for life, and it was always hubris which led them to believe it could ever guide them or answer to them.

This holds true for both of them. They have always been each other's mirror; opposite but the same, a reflection, and it has taken Maul as long to learn that as it has taken Kenobi to go white and worn.

He is here for closure, more than anything else. An ending. He aches for that like he once ached for belonging, like he once ached for approval and like he once ached to avenge himself; a single-minded need, all-consuming and punishing in its own way.

Finding that Kenobi yet lives had driven every other thought from his mind, driven away whatever half-mad plans he had made about possibly rebuilding something -- a legacy or a monument or a platform with which to strike back against that which has hurt him -- and has left behind only this need. This desire to reach an ending.

But then his old enemy does the unexpected; in defiance of his precious Code, in defiance perhaps to the uncaring Force, certainly in defiance of Maul's expectations.

He apologizes.

"What I did to you was cruel," Kenobi says; he still has his saber in his hand, but both his hands are down in front of him, and for all of his careworn lines and prematurely white hair, his eyes are clear and steady and so is his voice. "I should have given you a clean death, and I didn't, and there's no-- justification I can give for the suffering you went through after it. I can only say that you weren't meant to live long enough to suffer, but that doesn't change that you have. I'm sorry, Maul."

It burns; it burns instantly and fiercely and for a moment it feels like the heat of it scours the skin and muscle right off of his aching skeleton. It peels his lips back and has him showing his sharp canines and _this_ isn't what he came here for.

It breaks something, too; old walls, ancient walls, sourced of junk and a witch's manipulations and the occasional grasping desperation to _matter_ , and behind it is something very long-wounded and abandoned, but apparently-- not quite dead yet.

Dead things don't hurt, but this does.

"I fought with _honor_ ," he snarls back, hand wrapped around his bastardized sabercane hard enough it makes his bones creak, voice torn no less rough than the rest of him. That this is exposing a weakness doesn't cross his mind. "I fought you and Jinn _fairly_."

"I know." The agreement is simple and immediate. Neither of them ignites their weapon. Kenobi doesn't flinch; his warrior's body has not forgotten what a fight looks like, his frame is perfectly still and perfectly wired for it, but he makes no move to turn this into the fight Maul came here seeking. "As I've said, I've had a lot of time to think. What time steals in vigor, I suppose it returns in something like wisdom: You deserved an honorable death for an honorable fight, what came after deserved an acknowledgment, and I should have realized that long ago."

It's not as if it would have made a difference. "I still would have killed her," he says, but even as he does, he can't say it with absolutely perfect certainty.

"Probably," Kenobi agrees, and something pained radiates off of him, into the space between them, but he doesn't twist it into anger or take back his words. "But-- perhaps not. We can never know. But you wronging me doesn't change that I did wrong by you. And if we're to do this -- throw ourselves at one another seeking an ending to this -- then I want you to know that."

 

 

 

Maul has died and died and died; dozens of times or hundreds.

Death isn't something that happens all at once. It happens in pieces and when something does manage to spring out of the shattered remnants, it's never quite the same as it would have been before. He measures his life not in years, but on the death of things; he has never known fully his age and has lost track again and again of the estimate, but he knows his losses and numbers them higher and higher and each time looks back over the long trail of grave markers wondering why he was ever stupid enough to have these things which can die in the first place.

(There's a difference between killing and death most of the time, but not all of it; some of those markers have names, too.)

What he _wants_ , more than anything at all, is for the hurting to stop. He has long-since conquered physical pain, but he's never managed to get rid of the other kind, no matter how many things die or how many things he loses.

He dwells on this on Malachor; much of the time he is busy with staying alive or plotting or training, but all of his long years of solitude have not completely broken from him the ability to be _lonely_. He's used to it, he's good at it, but he's never wholly at ease with it. It comes in like a fog; a slow creep, chilling and obscuring both, and on those long nights is when he counts the markers and reflects on them.

He has always been poor at continuity. At grasping the long-term of cause-and-effect. He lives in the present and has always, so it comes as a shock even to him when he can start to see the pattern of things; when he can look back and start to see how one thing leads to the next, which leads to the next. How one death leads to another and another. His desire to escape that room on Mustafar had died in favor of a desire to prove himself; his desire to escape pain died in favor of enduring it and using it to be stronger; his desire for meaning died in favor of a constant, restless hunger.

Other things were murdered.

A thousand times, he's tried to figure out if Deenine had trapped him or if the droid had not lied to him and was trapped into it, into offering something like companionship and thus been innocent of wrongdoing when that offering was shattered in a manner which hurt far worse than snapped bones did.

A thousand times, he's tried to figure out if his Master knew of his-- friendship? Comfort? Affection towards?-- _interest_  in Kilindi Matako, or if she had been so meaningless as to be under his Master's scanners. Her wide, dark, scared eyes haunt him long after she's dust.

A thousand more, he's tried to figure out how things could have been different with his own brother and that despair never dies; quicksilver fast but blade sharp, it's never stopped hurting.

 

 

 

When he had nothing else, he had a blade and he had honor. The first, he owed as much to his droids as he did his Master; the second, he owed only to himself. Sidious never taught him that; Maul learned it from hints and impressions during his early education and clung to those fragments, building them into a platform to stand on alone.

Sidious destroyed so many things, but it was Theed and Lotho Minor that took away that last twisted idealism, that part of him which refused to booby-trap the path through Theed's generator complex, the part of him that went into that battle with only his body, his blade and his connection to the Force.

It was Kenobi who took that, and behind the walls of debris and madness and decay, it never stopped bleeding.

It seems somehow apt, in some ironic or grim way, that it's Kenobi who reminds him that it lives there yet, however wounded.

 

 

 

He doesn't know what to do with an apology; only one person has ever apologized to him before and meant it, and that was Savage, and that apology was for a failure he never really committed and for not being Maul, and neither of those were ever things that needed an apology.

He doesn't know what to do with it. This isn't the hack-handed, manipulative attempt to win favor that happened in that throne room in Sundari; whatever else, Maul has always had a particular talent for perceiving truthfulness when the person on the other side doesn't have the ability (or desire) to shield their intentions, and so Kenobi's words ring with it now where before they were clouded.

"I didn't come here for this," he finds himself saying, and even to his own ears the words sound more tired than angry; more like a resignation than demand.

"I know," Kenobi says, no differently. His mirror, wearing his years on his skin, inexorably bound by blood and bone.

 _Hope,_  Maul had said, but it's only a word when you don't quite know the definition for it. For him, it's a concept more than something he's ever felt; unlike honor, which is something he could make tangible through actions, hope is an invisible, fragile, fleeting thing that hides around corners or vanishes when he thinks he catches a glance at it. Hope, nebulously, that he can finally reckon it all. Scratch the surface, and what is beneath still bleeds; he would like to _stop_ now.

"I don't know what to do," he mutters, only peripherally aware he's even speaking aloud; a habit or a madness, but something he's never been able to quit entirely after Lotho Minor.

It's not even a lament, so much; more, a statement of fact. Kenobi's apology has thrown everything into disarray; cut through the fierce determination to spill blood or to have his own be spilled; perhaps they could have ended one another at the same time, and thus both freed themselves at once. That would have been a fitting ending, Maul thinks; that would have been a good end for mirror images, to die bound just as they've lived bound and for all of their suffering to end, finally, _finally_.

"My time will come. But not yet," Kenobi says, heavily, and Maul realizes he's probably been rambling all of that aloud. The Jedi is watching him, something glittering in his eyes, but it doesn't look or feel like anger. Maul isn't sure what it is, only that it stings like disinfectant in a cut, hums in the lowest part of his throat, echoing off of him. "I have cause to be here, for now," Kenobi finishes, as if making a decision.

Maul squints at him; he is becoming aware again that he is sun-sick and dehydrated and that this half-mortal husk is ailing -- and that his mind is not much less shaky -- but he pauses and thinks nonetheless, falling quiet even into his own thoughts and though it's foolhardy to close his eyes on an enemy, he does anyway.

In the slowly settling stillness, like sediment drifting to the bottom of a canister, the Force clarifies. Somewhere there is a bright, young light that isn't Ezra Bridger; it feels almost familiar.

"Who is it?" Maul asks, trying to get a better sense of the Force signature. He doesn't wait for an answer, though, before his eyes snap open and he raises his lip at Kenobi. "Not another _Chosen One_?"

It's derisive, and he's less satisfied than he wants to be when Kenobi winces in a drawn manner, but then Kenobi shakes his head. "No. No, he's going to have a choice, and I'll fight to my last breath to make sure he can choose his own future."

_Unlike us._

He doesn't need to say the words with his voice; they ring out nonetheless.

More carefully, Kenobi says, "But if he so chooses, I think--" The old Jedi pauses and works his jaw, then heaves out a slow breath. "I think, that if he chooses that path, he'll be the one to end the Empire. And the one who will be the downfall of Darth Sidious."

Maul has long since had any notion of being that himself beaten out of him, if not in one way, then in another or another. He closes his eyes again and feels the boy out there, young and bright, like a star in the desert. Closer, the battered and worn Jedi acting as guardian; Kenobi's words ring sincere and truthful. He thinks that is hubris, too; that the Jedi clings to old ideals of bright saviors and balance and a Force which guides them all. But it's a hubris he can understand because his own has been no different in the past; the idea that he is meant for something.

That part of him died, too, long ago.

He has two -- three -- things which are his; he doesn't know if he's better for any of them. Here, embodied in flesh and cybernetics is whatever it is within him that clings tenaciously to life, so much so that he came here to die with a blade in hand and perhaps take Kenobi with him, because he can't overcome it enough to just end himself.

A second, as useless as it is; the part of him that has found things to care about no matter how many times the caring has been crushed -- a girl at Orsis, droids in the Works, his brother, a foolish headstrong boy -- grasping desperately at these little pieces of connections to ward off the loneliness he is too good at living in.

Lastly, that wounded sense of honor, something he built to stand on, which did not come from his Master or anyone else, only himself. It lives yet, this echo of a younger-him who believed in a fair fight and a good death.

"This isn't what I came here for," he says again, but this time it's a resignation. He did not come here for an apology or a purpose, but now he's ended up with both and while it feels almost like defeat to hang his cane off of his belt, there's a moment of something more fragile and fleeting, as well.

"I know." Kenobi also repeats himself, but then he crouches carefully, creakily, and picks up his canteen before stepping closer and offering it. "But we've lasted this long. When we sell our lives, we ought to make them pay dearly for them."

 _Vader_ , Maul thinks.  _And Sidious._

Kenobi's are a warrior's words; when Maul shows his teeth, it's in a blade-sharp grin of accord.

 

 

 

He might have long given up any thought that he will ever get to confront his Master directly, but Kenobi provides many a way to get at Sidious indirectly, and standing on a platform of mixed spite and wounded honor, Maul follows those paths and leaves the Jedi to bake on Tatooine.

How he ends up on Scarif is a winding journey, unexpected and shifting like the dunes of the Jundland Wastes, creating new landscapes with every windstorm; it starts with a name and a code and leads to him eventually being a mechanic on Yavin 4, keeping the rag-tag Rebellion's ships in flight-worthy condition, made more difficult for the need to improvise in a hurry and some easier for his subtle and hidden use of _mechu-deru_. He keeps to himself for obvious reasons, leans heavily upon the Force training which allowed him to move invisibly for the most part even on Coruscant, avoids anyone who might recognize him through his cloaking, though he does get along well enough with some of the Rebellion's rougher elements after hours that he can sit and listen to their blood-soaked stories.

It's not for loyalty to the Rebellion, for their cause, for the sake of glory, or for altruism; all of those things were left in the graveyard behind him long ago.

But when the opportunity comes to steal the plans for the DS-1 Orbital Battle Station, he volunteers to go with the group of rogue operators, in defiance of their leadership, because depriving Sidious of that monstrosity sounds like it's just about the right price for him to sell his life for. No one needs to tell him it's a one-way trip; Maul knows what a suicide mission looks like, whatever the intentions of those leading it.

He is there to provide one more body who can fight; he is there to help mow down stormtroopers and make certain that the base can be infiltrated. He is there to play decoy and to hold the line, and therefore, to save a single life almost on a whim, in exchange for one he'd taken so many lives ago.

He's there to knock a grenade right back into the enemies who threw it; to look up into the wide, scared, dark eyes of the pilot and order, _"Fly,"_ then turn back to cover Rook's escape.

 

 

 

When the light boils on the horizon, he thinks of the blow he just had a part in landing on his former Master, measures the price he's put on his own life, and decides that it's a fair one. And it's only then that all of the hurting stops, and for that short and singular span of time, he finally has a proper definition for hope.

He thinks of his mirror.

He thinks of his brother.

And then the light comes and he lets go.


End file.
